3D Modeling - Week 3: Baking -- and I don't mean cookies

The next adventure of my modeling introduction is baking!

They look very similar to the UV maps and are reliant upon them, but they take so much less work to figure out.

There are three different bakes we were introduced too: Normal, Ambient (OA) and Position maps.

Normal Mapping
This is the first and most important map to bake and set up correctly first. I had to take a few parts of it into Photoshop and fix some areas that didn't look as well.

My bake ended up as this beautiful rainbow:

My only concern about the bake is that it is difficult to tell, with no experience, where the problems will happen from the bake to your model.

My low-res model with the normal maps applied: 

It LOOKS pretty okay from what I can tell. I am not quite sure what I am looking for as far as problems go though. Correcting the envelope was a small issue that I worked through as well as I had to go back and fix some unfolded with my original UV mapping.

AO Mapping
The next mapping we were introduced to was Ambient or AO mapping. This was a nifty way to color and place textures on the model. This mapping went a bit faster, so there is not as much to explain besides me not being able to tell what is wrong with the final model.

My initial AO Bake is a simple black and white bake showing all the dings and dents:

I cleaned it up in Photoshop and changed some of the coloring to make it look less harsh with such a high contrast.

Applied to my final model where I think it looks like it wasn't applied well, but I am not sure why the map isn't updating.

See the black on the edges? No idea.

Position Mapping

The third and final baking was for positional mapping. This allows a super awesome gradient to be applied to your model to get it looking suave. :)

My model pre-bake. See that nice gradient? 

Here is the final baking that came from the above model:

I decided to play with the lighting and gradient more and decided to try out some colors:

This was taken into Photoshop and I just created a mask to apply to the cannon bake.

The cannon ultimately ended up looking like this with this particular bake:

Mudbox

After applying all three bakes to my low-res model, I brought the model into Mudbox 2016 and hand-painted the model.

This image is my final normal map that was ultimately baked from my high-res model to my low-res model.

This was my model first brought into Mudbox. The red dots indicate where triangles are, which is not a problem for this model.

This is the final result after painting my model. I wanted my cannon to have gold plates sitting on a stone base.

Notes:

This processes really helped me understand more of the 3D modeling process. The process I have so far:
- Create Low Res Model
- Create UV Map
- Create High Res Model (but keep the low res available)
- Bring Higher-Res Model into ZBrush to texture the model
- Take that final High-Res and sculpted model and bake three maps:
   - Normal
   - AO
   - Pos
           *Normal Map is the BMP map, AO and Pos are layered to create color for the model.

- Bake those onto the lower res-model to give it the appearance of a high-res model.
- Take that model into Mudbox to give it color and more texture.